DIRECTORS

Director/producer Jennifer Maytorena Taylor’s award-winning features and short films have shown at venues such as Sundance, Camden, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Locarno Film Festivals, Hot Docs, IDFA, DOC NYC, NY Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Channel, Al Jazeera, NHK-Japan, and frequently on PBS. They explore diverse stories like gentrification battles, spontaneous dance celebrations, Latin American Dirty Wars, Puerto Rican American Muslim hip-hop culture, families coping with extreme sentencing laws – and most recently, rural life in an era of refugee crises, the opioid epidemic and White rage. Feature credits include For the Love of Rutland, New Muslim Cool, Daisy and Max, and Paulina. Shorts include Scary Sacred Cow Poker, Visiting Day, Redneck Muslim, Message to Zaire, and the upcoming The Next Message. Her newest feature documentary Genius, currently in development with an investigative journalist, explores the booming North American marijuana industry, the true costs of white collar crime and corruption, and their surprising connections to dirty Russian money. She has held fellowships at institutions such as Banff Centre for the Arts, USC Annenberg School for Journalism, Points North Institute, MacDowell Colony, and Sundance Documentary Institute. Born in Los Angeles of mixed Anglo and Mexican descent, Jennifer is primarily based in San Francisco. She is a professor and the current director of the Social Documentation MFA program at UC Santa Cruz.